Grammatico-Semantic Content of Primitives in the Major Themes of News Watch’s Reports on Nigerian Politics

Semantic primitives are conceptual words of natural language with universal meanings. These words describe other words conceptually and not themselves. They are capable of indicating politics-driven engagement of language in reportage of Newswatch magazine on politics in Nigeria. Earlier studies on political reports in the media have focused on deployment of language in editorials, various styles of presentations and sundry other issues considered worthy of serious examination neglecting grammatico-semantic content of semantic primitives engaged in such studies. This current study, therefore, through survey and descriptive methods, examined the distribution of semantic primitives in the reports on politics in Nigeria in Newswatch newsmagazine. The employment of these two methods yielded salient information on features of language and the observable patterns of their interconnectedness; the major themes they project and their grammatico-semantic content. The study adopted relevant aspects of Anna Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory and Vyvyan Evans’ Lexical Concept and Cognitive Model (LCCM). The former handled the semantic primitives and their imports while the latter concerned itself with the lexical concepts of the primitives. Data were collected from 48 purposively sampled 2010 editions of Newswatch newsmagazine from where a corpus of one million words was built for the study. The resulting data were analysed. The findings revealed that, semantic primitives associated with the theme of governance, electoral process, political power and party politics are identified. The themes of Electoral process and Governance were predominantly marked by nominal/verbal collocates; the theme of Political power was marked by adjectival/ verbal collocates and Party politics theme was marked by nominal/adjectival collocates.